This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. The trend at third generation synchrotron macromolecular crystallographic beam lines is towards use of progressively smaller (<50 micron) crystals of objects of increasing complexity (e.g. multienzyme complexes, biomolecular machines like the ribosome). Both trends depend upon development of technologies for extremely stable, high brilliance x-ray optics, high speed data collection, and minimization background (noise) in diffraction measurements from weakly diffracting samples. Additionally, since any given user has very limited access to our facilities, we have a strong imperative for maximizing the efficiency of our beam lines. Core 2 attempts to develop specific technologies and methods to answer these problems. Efforts in our Core 2 goals have focused on the following: 1) Continued development of our beam stabilization methodologies. 2) Improvements in the flexibility and calibration of our detector configuration systems. 3) Installation of a sample robotic loader on 24-ID-C (discussed in SPID 0099).